‘See how the west was FUN’ says the poster. Except we can’t really, the film is a superlong super production in Ultra Panavision 70. There are various versions, 35mm and 70mm, the longest being 165 minutes, replete with overture and intermission, and it’s neither funny nor exciting enough to support such a length.
Burt Lancaster, now over 50 is cast as Colonel Thaddeus Gearhart, the father of a grown daughter (Pamela Tiffin), engaged to one of his underlings (Robert Hutton) but taken up with the combination of women’s liberation and the temperance movement preached by the very popular Cora Templeton Massingale (Lee Remick), who preaches that women can only be free from patriarchy and equal to men once men stop being enslaved to the demon drink. This poses a bit of a problem as the Colonel’s forces are meant to accompany 40 wagons of whisky to Denver, who’s running short and afraid of running dry once winter sets and travel rendered impossible. Thus the women accompany the army, the owner of the whisky (Brian Keith), the Denver town drunks lead by a very funny Donald Pleasance, and various tribes of native peoples who are after the whisky for themselves. It’s all meant to be funny but all that ‘poking fun’ at Indians and Feminists often crosses the line into offensiveness. That Martin Landau is cast as a greedy Indian Chief and that the role is just a patronising punch line to many of the situations is all you need to know to understand what I mean.
The film is shot in Ultra Panavision 70, some of the shots of horses and caravans amidst the great outdoors are truly spectacular. There is a consistency of tone established by a voice-over, often verbally ironising what one sees on screen. Donald Pleasance has some lovely moments as an oracle who can only foresee the future with the aid of whisky, with his sky-blue eyes lighting up amidst the dirt of his face every time he has a vision. It’s a dreamy, delirious and affectionate turn. One of the few things in this film that does actually work. Lastly, I think the film is also worth seeing for the insertion of a then nascent second-wave feminist movement into the Western genre, almost certainly a response to the emerging movement in the States at that point, but which is rare enough for me to want to include the clips below:
The sign ‘Women Can Remake the World’, the singing, Robert Hutton’s reactions, all are pleasurable. ‘If we are to enjoy equal rights with men then we are to respect him and if we are to respect him we must save him from himself and the poison of alcoholic spirits. Do you agree?’ says Cora/Lee Remick. Emancipation, Freedom for Women, Women Can Remake the World: These are phrases not normally heard in a Western. The singing of the Hymn of the Republic then wraps this feminism in the flag and inserts it into a narrative of the founding of the US, gives it a history, represents the First Wave so to speak, except it’s a comic one, played for laughs, though the women are not as offensively the butt of jokes as the Native Peoples or the Irishmen threatening to strike.
In the clip above you can see Burt Lancaster’s reaction to Lee Remick’s discourse: ‘Our enemy has two heads, first the enslavement of women by men and secondly the enslavement of men by the remorseless tyrant alcohol. We must reach out for freedom and tear this tyrant from the lips of men.’ The cutting always returns to Lancasters’ reaction, which the audience is asked to identify with, particularly as his daughter has joined up with the cause. And when the women decide to march along with the wagons to Denver, the Colonels’s underling asks, ‘What are we to do Sir? What happens if we run into Indians?’ ‘I pray for the Indians,’ says the Colonel.
JA
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We conclude our dalliance with Jean-Pierre Melville with 1970’s Le Cercle rouge, a heist film with an impressive cast of Alain Delon, Gian Maria Volonté, and Yves Montand. We discuss how genre conventions operate in the film – the shortcuts an understanding of genre provides allow details to make the difference, Mike suggesting that it all comes out through character relationships and quirks.
In discussing Le Cercle rouge, we think back on what we’ve learned about Melville’s style, themes and interests. For Melville, emotional attachment is dangerous and makes one vulnerable; it’s a rather bleak outlook, but José argues that his films aren’t without their romantic aspects. Mike remarks upon the way in which Melville’s style has been interpreted and appropriated by the filmmakers he influenced, noting that the vivacity with which, for instance, Quentin Tarantino effuses about Melville is not reflective of Melville’s films themselves, which are slower and more pensive than you might be led to expect. To José, it’s existentialist cinema through and through, and, naturally, he loves it.
With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.
My Burt Lancaster film of last night was Gunfight at the OK Corral (John Sturges, 1957), a landmark hit of the fifties, with one of those ballads sung throughout (by Frankie Laine), that help pace and narrate and that Cat Ballou (Elliot Silverstein, 1965) would parody to great effect a decade later. What struck me most was not just the whiteness of Sturges’ West– there isn’t a black person, Indian or Mexican in the whole movie — but its blondness. Everyone seems fair haired or blu-eyed or both: not just Kirk and Burt and Joan Van Fleet, but the supporting cast as well: Earl Holliman, John Ireland, Martin Milner, DeForest Kelly, Lee Van Cleef. Rhonda Fleming’s red hair is about the only bit of diversity. Dennis Hopper as the youngest Clanton brother, fresh from his appearance in Rebel Without A Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955), lit very beautiful to underline the tragedy of his death to come, still to shed his baby fat, and half the size of Burt, is what led to this thought.
The film pays subtle hommage to John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946):
It’s worth comparing what this film might signify in contrast to Burt and Kirk’s first pairing as two Depression gangsters caught up in a postwar world of passion, crime and shadows a decade earlier in I Walk Alone (Byron Haskin, 1947).
It’s also worth contrasting to the presence of native peoples, Mexicans and blacks –the latter often in tiny or non-speaking roles but as soldiers or figures of authority — in the Robert Aldrich/ Burt Lancaster westerns such as Apache and Vera Cruz, both released in 1954.
The film was a worldwide success that left an imprint on several generations and was easily parodied. As you can see here in the Goodies episode of Bunfight at the OK Tea Rooms that Nicky Smith directed me to:
And Richard Layne has also pointed out to me that there’s also the Doctor Who version, complete with a song:
Does anyone else fend themselves regressing to the comforts of childhood at this time? After a day of marking, I could have re-seen the Clouzot films on MUBI that I love — Le corbeau (1943)and Qaui des orfèvres (1947) — but I just couldn´t think anymore and found myself subscribing to the Universal channel, where I saw Stanley Donen´s Arabesque (1966), with Sofia Loren and a stiff Gregory Peck. The film´s a bit leaden but charming and as evocative of sixties glamour as anything I´ve seen, Sofia wearing Dior throughout, and Donen filming everything in an imaginative and colourful way, with a pop sensibility one associates with Swinging Sixties. Each shot is playful if not exactly meaningful. A film that doesn´t quite work but that remains a lot of fun.
I also saw Operation Petticoat (Blake Edwards, 1959) which made me understand the whispers around Blake Edward´s sexuality — all those half-naked sailers on the submarine and, despite all the talk, such a subdued look at the nurses –and where Tony Curtis is so good he outshines Cary Grant (yes, it´s possible). I ended the evening with The Black Shield of Falsworth (Rudolph Maté, 1954), where Curtis is not good. You can see he does many of his own stunts but without the grace of movement someone like Lancaster would have brought to them — every move´s an effort for Tony. but Janet Leigh is at her most beautiful, Herbert Marshall is recognisable only by his voice but that´s enough, and the whole thing is a lighthearted silly medieval adventure that looks quite good. These are films that were on rotation on tv channels when I was young and I found a certain comfort in the re-visit.
José Arroyo
Has there ever been a better illustration of Trin T. Min-ha´s precept that there´s a ´first world in every third world and vice versa´? An act of littering by a young man, Jean (Alexandre Hamidi) leads to a dispute. The wrapping paper seems to hit a beggar woman Maria (Luminita Gehorgiou), and Amadou (Ona Ly Yenke), a young black teacher, chases after him to demand an apology. Anne (Juliet Binoche) the parter of Jean´s brother, Georges (Thierry Nouvic) gets involved in the melée. The result is that the black man is taken to the police station, the migrant woman is deported and, seemingly, Jean and Anne are left to go on with their lives. But things are not so simple, the film posits a rural/ metropolitan divide. Jean lives with his father on a farm and wants a different kind of life but if he goes for it the farm will dissolve. Jean will leave the farm and we will never be told what happens to him,.
Anne and George both work with images. Anne is an actress. She´s constantly performing, inhabiting, trying out, changing, manipulating the images she helps construct. She´s had some success but her gender makes her vulnerable, and in metro cars she can be easily intimidated and harassed by Arab youths out for a lark (the youth and the older man who tells him he ought to be ashamed of himself for his behaviour will play father and son in Caché). Georges is a photographer who goes to war zones to document what he sees. He finds life simpler there, easier than the farm with his father, and simpler than Paris and his relationship with Anne. But do his pictures make a difference?
At the beginning of the film, a child performs a guess game to other children, seemingly deaf and mute, who must guess the idea or thing being performed. But they can´t. They don´t have the code to unlock its meaning. Likewise, with the rest of the film. Amadou´s family lives in Paris. But they don´t understand him. His mother likes to have her life explained according to superstitions from her village in Mali and thinks her son´s bad luck comes from seeing a white woman. The father, who drives a cab in Paris, leaves them to return home where his car makes him a rich man. Likewise, with Maria, selling papers on the streets of Paris but a woman of property in her village in Romania, building houses so that each of her daughters can marry and driven to tears because she remembers the disgust with which she gave money to a gypsy beggarwoman and realises that now people treat her in the same way.
All the scenes progress linearly and all these various worlds intersect in the film. But, each having its own code, these worlds, much less the events that take place in them are only understood by those who live within them and have access to the various codes of communication, ones that differ even when different peoples and cultures share a geographical space.
The abrupt cuts to black, often with characters in mid-sentence, has the effect of creating a different sense of time and space, the narrative moves forward, but at each instance one gets the sense that the other characters one is not seeing continue to inhabit the story, that there are different stories of which one is getting only a partial view. Time encompasses many spaces in this film. Even when the fim´s showing you only the particulars of one space, the lives of those who inhabit that particular space in that particular time, the abruptness of the cuts and the severe and lingering fades to black, create a feeling that all those other lives in all of those different but interconnected spaces, continue. Now if we only had the codes necessary to understand them,.
This lack of understanding is not just between rural-metropolitan, north and southern Europe, Europe and Africa, white versus black or Arab, but also between male and female: ´Have you ever made anyone happy? asks Anne of Georges.
It´s a great work and I´m only sorry it´t taken me 20 years to re-visit it.
José Arroyo
In Visconti’s Bellissima, all of Ana Magnani’s dreams of cinema get crushed. But then she hears Burt Lancaster’s voice…..Her husband’s a naysayer. But then, some people just don’t get it. It’s perhaps significant in Visconti that we see John Wayne in Red River but that it is Montgomery Clift and Burt Lancaster that are referred to by name as objects of admiration. And of course Lancaster would go on to work with Visconti in The Leopard and in Conversation Piece, and even before that, with Magnani in The Rose Tattoo.
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Jean-Pierre Melville draws upon his experiences in the French Resistance for 1969’s Army of Shadows, which depicts an ensemble including Lino Ventura, Simone Signoret and Paul Meurisse working to disrupt the Nazi occupation of France, rescuing Resistance members from captivity, operating safehouses… and killing informants.
Army of Shadows‘ view of the Resistance is far from romantic, showing the ordinary people who comprise it being driven to extreme measures in the cause of remaining hidden and evading capture, and the threat of capture and death hanging over them at all times. We compare it to The Great Escape, a caper in which prisoners of war work towards a big victory – there’s nothing of the sort in Army of Shadows, the Resistance only ever staying one step ahead of the Nazis pursuing them. Resistance itself is the victory, and it comes with costs.
We think about continuities between this film and Melville’s other work. The isolation felt in Un flic and Le Doulos comes through here, the Resistance members needing to work together but constantly suspicious of one another, as anyone could turn informant; emotional connection is a danger, as it can be used as a thumbscrew. But the film depicts the courage of the Resistance, the inhumanity of the situations into which they’re forced, and elicits a range of feelings simultaneously. It’s a complex, intelligent, essential film.
With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.
These are such fun to make: 
When Burt’s whole body isn’t sprawled out as spectacle to encompass a widescreen frame, ie when he attempts ‘serious’ acting in ‘serious’ drama, as in Inge’s ‘Come Back, Little Sheba’, he goes all Greer Garson prim and buttons up even his pyjamas:
Burt and Jean Peters in the kind of blackface no one seemed to have any problem with in 1954. His is the body on display throughout, and displayed as spectacle as you can see here, thought without the delightfully buffoonish obviousness of Schwarzenegger film of the mid 1980s. I understand Apache was shot in 1.37 and cropped to create a wide-screen image. I don’t think accommodating the sprawl of Burt’s body was the primary consideration.
Film was shot in 1.37 and cropped to create a 1.85 image.
This was originally published as: Arroyo, José.Sight and Sound; London Vol. 7, Iss. 2, (Feb 1997): 40-41,3.
Burt Lancaster became a star in 1946 with The Killers. He began producing his own films in 1948 with Kiss The Blood Off My Hands (1948). Lancaster continued to star in films for another forty years. His success as a producer was so extensive that he is considered central to the relaunch of UA in the 1950s. The profits of Apache, Vera Cruz and The Kentuckian officially launched the new UA in the 1950s, and according to David Shipman, the decisive factor in its rise to affluence was Burt Lancaster. It is significant that he would never direct solo again (He’s credited as co-director with Roland Kibbee on The Midnight Man (1974).
The Kentuckian tells the story of Elias Wakefield (Burt Lancaster) caught up in a feud back home who wants to get to Texas with his son to be free and lead an independent life in the 1820s, gets waylaid into a life of business with his brother Zach (John McIntire), caught between two women, a schoolteacher (Diana Lynn) and an indentured servant (Dianne Foster) who knows how to use a gun, all the while being hunted down by the From Brothers from back home. It’s not bad but it’s really not good. Particularly terrible is the direction of the actors. The more inexperienced, the more they suffer: Donald MacDonald as the son is particularly terrible. It’s only more expert or experienced actors such as Una Merkel and John Carradine who come off well. Walter Matthau, whose first appearance on film this is, already knew enough to accuse Lancaster of ‘not knowing what the hell you’re talking about (Burford, loc 2715).
As a director, Lancaster’s got no sense of composition, of where to place the camera in relation to the actors. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times, accused the director of lacking consistency of pace and tone and letting the whole thing run wild. ‘It is evident that Mr. Lancaster was almost exclusively concerned with the pleasure and effectiveness of his performance, whether he was aware of it or no’. I agree about the pace and tone but disagree about Lancaster being concerned only with his own perfomance. As you can see in the only scene from the film people seem to remember — the one where Walter Matthau whips him — Lancaster the director does no favours to Lancaster the star.
Lancaster who is grace itself in motion directs what amount to a set piece with almost little tension, little evoked through framing, composition or movement. He places the camera under the cart for what initially seems like no reason, and remains little reason other than a foreshadowing, an his strength, his body, his agility, are given short shrift by himself. It’s now awful but one can’t help but think what Aldrich or Tourneur would have done with him in the scene.
It’s perhaps telling that it took me six hours to watch the film, watch a little, get bored, go online, watch a little more, make breakfast, watch a little more….it’s not awful, and it was a success in its time, but it’s far from primo Lancaster.
The film’s greatest legacy is perhaps the painting Lancaster commissioned from Thomas Hart Benton to publicise the film (above).
José Arroyo
Caught The Rainmaker on TPTV last night, one of those 1950s film adaptations of not very good Broadway plays then considered ´significant´and ‘important´ and filmed with so little skill and imagination they now have the virtue of conveying what the Broadway production might have been like. Anyway, I digress, the main reason for posting is that I was just bowled over by Katharine Hepburn, charming and touching in a really embarrassingly conceived role. The play is a about the tensions between accepting reality and using fantasy and imagination to escape it. And the theme is played out over the figure of Lizzie, who does´t conform to then dominant notions of femininity. The play keeps asking ´what is a woman’ and assumes a female can only be a ´real woman´if she´s with a man. Burt Lancaster is athletic, a little over the top, but rather poetic with it as well. His Starbuck is not just a huckster but a dreamer and the performance is a dynamic dry run for his Elmer Gantry of a few years later. Pauline Kael called the casting, ´just about perfect’ even though Hepburn is about twenty years old for the part. ´Hepburn is stringy and tomboyish, believably plain and magnetically beautiful’ (p. 483, 5001 Nights).
Watching The Rainmaker last night made me wonder if any star´s reputation has altered so much as Hepburn´s in my lifetime. When I was a teenager in the 70s, she was the biggest and most influential star of the classic era, still getting leading roles in prestige productions, and in the late sixties being ranked higher as a box office star than she´d ever been in her whole career, plus winning Academy Awards, starring in hit musicals on Broadway, prestige adaptations on television that were seen nationwide by huge audiences (Love Among the Ruins, The Glass Menagerie). Books were published to satiate and fan demand, Charles Higham´s biography in 1975, Garson Kanin´s memoir, Tracey and Hepburn in 1970. She was a feminist role model, often cited as the most admired woman in America in the 1970s. Andrew Britton published one of the key early monographs on stardom through an analysis of her personal in 1984: Katharine Hepburn: Star as Feminist. Now….
It seems that what used to grate with audiences before (the voice, the mannerisms, the dreamy floweriness of her style) grate now. The feminism that then seemed so daring (Sylvia Scarlett but I´m thinking particularly Woman of the Year, how it seems less so now, and the ending of the latter is often used against her, forgetting all that leads up to it). Her great films (e.g. Holiday) are still greatly admired. But as a star, has lost some of the lustre she had in the 70s. And she didn´t even beat her daughter with a wire hanger to lose her lustre.
She doesn´t inspire worship the way Crawford, Bergman, Davis and others do. As an actress, Stanwyck is the one who´s most in fashion now. Hepburn was too uninterested in the things that inspire gay cults (glamour, clothes, jewels) and she has certainly been the victim of the viciousness of queens (Cecil Beaton´s diaries are particularly nasty). Of course her need to be the centre of attention in her quite old age, the awful tv movies near the end that seemed to get worse and worse, the extreme ego-centrism of her autobiography, Me, none of that has helped….
..But then one sees her charm, and shine and daring in even something so second-rate as The Rainmaker, something so second rate that is nonetheless still seen for what Lancaster and she bring to it, and one thinks, well, these things are cycles, and the evidence of the work, she´ll be back in fashion again soon.
José Arroyo